The little ailments that plague an aging man are widespread enough to interest only those concerned and – at best – those around him. Pedro Almodovar placed them at the service of his cinema. From this pacing of daily annoyances, he gave birth to his most accomplished film since Volver (2006), the sweetest since La Fleur de mon secret (1995), the most stunning since Parle avec elle (2002).

At the center of Pain and Glory (2019) will be an aging and famous director, Salvador Mallo. To embody it, Antonio Banderas has aged a little, a lot disheveled, affirming, from the first sequences, the proximity between author and character. We can have fun looking for details borrowed from the daily life of Pedro Almodovar, who scatters small pebbles in all directions.

From Labyrinth of Passions (1982) to Pain and Glory, Antonio Banderas has never been better than with Almodovar. It is one of the prettiest wit of this film to give this actor who depends so much on the director who directs him, precisely, the role of a filmmaker, and to allow him to achieve a complexity and unprecedented depth in his career.

Better to get to know Salvador Mallo, as if we knew nothing about him. What happens to him – the fear at the approach of a still distant end, the doubt of the distance already traveled, the fleeting consolations and the new pains – are quite common. But because Pedro Almodovar gave him the privilege of living in fiction, Mallo benefits from the magical operation by which beauty imposes itself on the world, however trivial and cruel it may be.

prodigious urchin

Salvador lives as a recluse in a beautiful apartment that looks a bit like a museum, a lot like a funeral chamber – that’s how director of photography José Luis Alcaine explains it. We see the artist writhing in pain under the blows of age and lack of inspiration without this suffering, after all ordinary, invading the film. He no longer spins, spends time floating in midwater at the pool, and swallows theories of little pills. He dreams of the past, and first of all of his childhood, which emerges in luminous flashbacks, in the center of which shines the figure of his mother, Jacinta (Penélope Cruz).

It is also a woman, an actress, Zulema (Cecilia Roth), who administers the first electroshock to the recluse. She tells him that Alberto (Asier Etxeandia) – the chosen interpreter with whom Salvador got angry – is back in Madrid. The reconciliation with this bad boy who starred in one of the filmmaker’s greatest successes brings Salvador a little closer to the society of the living. The peace pipe they choose is a memory of the prodigious rascal that Almodovar was in his early days.

Beauty is at hand, in the objects that surround the sterile artist, in the memories by which he allows himself to be invaded, to take refuge in the illusion that the course of time can be reversed.